Who is he?

Few people had heard of Arsene Wenger when he came to Arsenal in 1996. He remains an enigma - a cultured, media-shy Frenchman who neither looks nor behaves like a football manager. But now he is probably the most influential figure in the English game. In the first of two extracts from a gripping new biography, Jasper Rees talks to those who know him best - players, coaches, and the people of the village in Alsace where he grew up

Jasper Rees

Sunday 17 August 2003 20.58 EDT
First published on Sunday 17 August 2003 20.58 EDT

Arsene Wenger sits on the bench at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff one Saturday in May. His team, Arsenal, are contesting another FA Cup final, their third in as many seasons. Out on the pitch his players are at it again, for one last time before the sun sets on another year. Thierry Henry receives the ball on the edge of the penalty area, waits for Dennis Bergkamp to make the run outside him on the right before sliding a pass into his path. Bergkamp twists and clips the ball back inside to Freddie Ljungberg, whose near-post shot bounces off a defender and into the path of Robert Pires. There is no other word. It is poetry - the metre and the rhythm, the beauty and the beat; France, Holland, Sweden, France; the blending of skill and athleticism and intuitive awareness that the players have of one another's movements.

On the bench Wenger watches, at once intensely involved and perfectly excluded. As the ball crosses the line he springs up and, walking towards the pitch, does his familiar celebration, elbows at his side, fists clenched and pumping discreetly. Then he applauds. Then he goes and sits down again. His is only a half -celebration, but then winning the much-eroded FA Cup is perhaps only a quarter triumph after the devastation of the preceding weeks, when Wenger's world seems slowly, incomprehensibly, to have caved in.

To anyone accustomed to his body language, defined by its restraint, its marked lack of passion, it is as if Wenger had a personality transplant in the spring of 2003. For months Arsenal had played what may even have been the best football ever produced by a British club. Power, in Wenger's prediction, was sprinting south. And then they blew it, they blew their lead, and Manchester United, with Sir Alex Ferguson urging them on like a whip-happy charioteer, remorselessly chased Arsenal down.

The first sign of erratic behaviour is when United come to Highbury one Wednesday night in mid-April. The passage of play switches dramatically. United score first, then Arsenal fluke an equaliser, then Henry is clearly offside as he gives Arsenal the lead, but before a minute has passed Ryan Giggs, unchallenged, has headed an equaliser. It is the most craven of mistakes. Giggs never scores with his head. Indeed, these days he almost never scores. At Old Trafford in the cup, he missed the mother and father of all open goals, and Arsenal won. But he gets this one, and on the touchline Wenger is distraught. He is flummoxed. He is actually incandescent. He turns to his assistant Pat Rice and starts shouting bitterly and gesticulating in the most florid Latin fashion. It's like watching someone completely lose it in the street - so shocking you don't want to look, but you can't pull your gaze away.

The idea is that this was uncharacteristic behaviour. In fact that's not quite true. The truth is that Wenger chooses, where possible, not to reveal his character on the touchline. According to him, he doesn't even reveal it in the dressing room. He wrote a book called Shosha No Esprit for the Japanese market. "As a manager," he says in it, "it is often necessary to suppress your own personal feelings. The feelings of the team must take priority. I have become accustomed to not showing my personal feelings. I have made it a habit to think always about the team."

This is why Mark Hateley, who scored the goals that won Monaco the championship in Wenger's first season there, told me, "You'll never figure him out." Concealment is integral to Wenger's character. The result is that very little is known about him. He is aided, of course, by the lack of an even half-remembered playing career to act as his calling card. In England, when he arrived in 1996, he was as close to being an unknown quantity as it is possible for the new Arsenal manager to be.

On Fridays they serve rosbif

The young Arsene Wenger, a native of Alsace, was discovered by Max Hild one spring in the late 1960s. "He was 18," says Hild, "and playing for his village. I was coach for the neighbouring team. Our espoirs were playing against Duttlenheim. It was a Wednesday evening. I can't remember the score but we won." The neighbouring team was AS Mutzig, a club with a reputation under Hild's stewardship for playing the best amateur football in Alsace. The espoirs were the kids, the ones who still have hope.

It was so long ago that England were world champions. Arsenal, with a team containing Pat Rice, Bob Wilson and George Graham, would not win the double for another couple of seasons. Rice would later be Arsene Wenger's assistant, Wilson his goalkeeping coach. Graham would be his predecessor, and his antithesis. "That was the first time I noticed him," says Hild. "He was a midfielder. He played very well. He made such an impression that I got in touch with him and the next year he came to play for Mutzig in the third division."

Hild is a small trim boyish man of 70 who meets me at the station in Strasbourg. It is a freezing Saturday morning in February and the city, the designated capital and centre of Europe, is quiet.

We get in Max Hild's car and head for Duttlenheim. We turn off the motorway and are soon ambling along a main drag flanked by a mixture of solid modern houses and charming older structures. A settlement has been here since Roman times, and the name Duttlenheim has been around since at least 992. It feels as if some of its buildings have too. There are yards with neatly-piled firewood and museum-piece agricultural instruments. In one courtyard is an old wooden farm building, and a couple of tractors. Next door to it is a house - neat, modern and impeccably bourgeois - with a steep sloping roof and a large conifer on the front lawn. The plate on the letterbox says "A Wenger". "A" in this instance stands for Alphonse.

Further down on the same block, just by the crossroads, is a restaurant. A bistro, they call it here. La Croix d'Or, it says above the door. Arsene Wenger's father Alphonse ran an automobile spare-parts business in Strasbourg, but he and his wife Louise also owned and ran La Croix d'Or. It must once have been a residential house and at some point transmogrified into a watering-hole. On a blackboard outside the dishes of the day are listed. On Fridays they serve rosbif.

It was in this building that the future manager of Arsenal grew up, along with his older sister and brother. Within its four walls Wenger imbibed one of the central tenets of his footballing philosophy: that it is an offence to be drunk in charge of a football, or even to let alcohol touch your lips as a player. Perhaps imbibed is the wrong word.

"When he was little he was in La Croix d'Or all the time," says Hild, who at the end of a long career as an amateur in the lower divisions had his first drink of beer at 36. "He saw a lot of people drinking, and the after-effects."

In 1996, when Wenger was revealed as the new manager of Arsenal, he inherited a captain in the early stages of recovery from addiction to alcohol. Never in a rush to volunteer much about himself, it took Wenger two years to open up to Tony Adams and pool his memories of the alcohol abuse which, for better or worse, helped to plump the family coffers. "It's further down the road that he actually had compassion for it," recalls Adams. "Later on, down the line he shared things with me. He talked about being brought up in a Strasbourg pub and observing the way alcohol changed people, the effect the drink had on people."

At Saturday lunchtime it is empty. The place looks pretty much as the Wengers left it more than 20 years ago. So says the current owner from under his thick grey moustache. Later in the afternoon it will fill with the smell of cigarettes and choucroute and beer and the chatter of Duttlenheimers whose families have known and intermarried with one another in this small community for centuries. You can't imagine an environment more alien to the clean, antiseptic worlds which Wenger would later try to create at each of the clubs where he was made coach: smoke-free, alcohol-free, fat-free. And yet it was the siège of FC Duttlenheim - the HQ, the head office - where the talk was all of football, where the game leaked into the marrow of the young Wenger and stayed there.

On the bar is a copy of Alsace Foot, a weekly newspaper that gives some idea of the local passion for the game. There are 80,000 registered players in Alsace, out of a population of only 1.5 million.

"Alsace has always been football country," says Hild. "It's been the number-one sport since I was a boy." The front page of Alsace Foot is usually devoted to Racing Club de Strasbourg, the big city outfit, but further in the font size gets smaller and the games more local. The results of the Ligue d'Alsace, in which FC Duttlenheim plays, are noted in the back half. Village football was truly a humble launchpad for the journey that followed - to running the prince's team in Monaco, Toyota's team in Japan, and on to the most traditional old club in the country that gave football to the world. No wonder, as the russet-cheeked barman says, while drying a glass, "Arsene really is a hero of Duttlenheim."

Hild's car turns right at the solitary traffic-light and treads gently through the village. We pass the ugly 19th-century bulk of St Louis (Catholic, of course), pass the mairie, and more barns and bungalows until we turn right down a track that leads to a small football pitch. It is hemmed in by the road on this side and the backs of houses on the other. Wedged in between the houses and the touchline is an open-sided stand of the kind you might erect to give horses shelter in a windy field. There is no seating, no rudimentary terrace. You could cram perhaps a hundred spectators in there, but you'd have to put the tall ones at the back.

It was on this ground that Wenger learned how to play football. There wasn't a lot else to do in Duttlenheim in the 50s and 60s. But after school, at weekends, in the holidays, there was football, or watching football. The FA Cup final was the first foreign football he clapped eyes on, on the one television set in the village - in the school - in the late 50s. He would have seen Tottenham win one half of their double in 1961.

The children would count the cars which occasionally passed through the village. "One of you took the Citroens, the other took the Renaults," remembers Claude Wenger, who may or may not be a relative. ("Perhaps our grandparents were cousins," he says vaguely.) Everyone knew one another. "Back then no one went away on holiday. We were together the whole time."

Because the Wengers ran a restaurant, they couldn't always keep an eye on their children. It was a village where everyone took care of the young. Wenger later compared it to a kibbutz. But it was a Catholic kibbutz. The young Wenger put his faith at the service of the team. He'd be in church reciting from his prayer book when the team were playing on Sunday. He would pray for them to win.

When he wasn't praying, he was rounding up boys to play in the game. In such a small village, it wasn't easy getting 11 together in one age group. Wenger would spend the whole week assembling a team. Otherwise they'd have to play one short, or two. Perhaps it was in the early 60s that he began his love affair with pace and power, as you needed these to combat numerically superior teams. Arsenal often thrive when one of their number has been sent off; and struggle, by contrast, when they are playing against 10.

Not that, at the age of 12, he could muster much in the way of pace or power. Hild says the player he later spotted was "quite quick". Claude Wenger says he was "quite slow". Most people seem to agree with Claude Wenger. He was also short enough to have earned a humiliating nickname. When he arrived at Arsenal they called him Clouseau because there was something haphazard and clumsy about him (plus he spoke English with a hilarious French accent). Then they called him Windows because he wore glasses. But as a young teenager they called him petit: titch.

"Even at 12 he was a very calm, very lucid player," says Jean-Noël Huck, who played for Mutzig. The same age as Wenger, he came up against him throughout their teens. "He was always the technician, the strategist of the team. He was already getting his ideas across, but calmly." Wenger was going through a growth spurt when he got into the FC Duttlenheim first team at 16. When he shot up, he still didn't use his head much, or at least not in the air. Training was once a week, on Wednesday evenings. There was no coach as such to instil tactics and skills, but someone who oversaw the session. On the pitch, even as the youngest player in the team, Wenger was in charge. "He was virtually, more or less, le patron," says Claude Wenger. "Arsene wasn't the captain and yet he was. It was, 'You do this, you do that, you do this, you do that.' He was the leader."

No one is watching

There is a standing joke at London Colney, the Arsenal training ground outside St Albans. The players are warming up. The squad contains some of the best players in the world. Pires, Bergkamp, Henry. While they're at it, Wenger, to whom these gifted young charges profess in interviews to owe absolutely everything, decides to take a few penalties. And yet as far as they are aware, he was a nothing player, a trundler, a carthorse, a Robin Reliant. He summons the club's travel manager and shoves him in goal. He addresses the ball. Perhaps he is wearing shorts, which by no means flatter a spindly man in his 50s. In Alsace they remember him as longiligne - long-limbed - but those limbs have now dwindled into pipe-cleaners. He runs up, with the slow lope of a giraffe. He is always trying little tricks. If he misses, there is derision, there is mockery, there is hooting and baying. But if he curls the ball into the top corner he turns round for a reaction, for applause, for the acclamation he never had as a player. But these World Cup winners, these European Champions, have turned their backs. There is silence.

Wenger played out his career as a footballer in something like silence. The biggest crowds he tended to come across were no more than 2,000-strong. It is now accepted in Britain that the extraordinary coaches are just as likely to have been ordinary players. See also Alex Ferguson, Ron Atkinson, Graham Taylor (at Watford in the 1980s). They have somehow alchemised their mediocrity as players into a managerial will to win.

Arsene who?

In August 1996, the name Arsene Wenger meant absolutely nothing in north London. "Arsene Who?" ran the Evening Standard headline that greeted his appointment. It was the story of his life, from the moment he took charge of his own team at Nancy 12 years earlier. In every new job, he didn't just have to prove himself; he had to introduce himself. "I remember when Rioch was sacked, one of the papers had three or four names," says Nick Hornby. "It was Venables, Cruyff and then at the end Arsene Wenger. I remember thinking as a fan, I bet it's fucking Arsene Wenger, because I haven't heard of him and I've heard of the other two. Trust Arsenal to appoint the boring one that you haven't heard of."

Hornby is sitting in San Daniele, a trattoria in Highbury, up the hill and round the corner from the famous old ground. The walls of the restaurant are adorned with the black-and-white regalia of Udinese, a small-town club from north-eastern Italy. This is the dining-room of the Arsenal establishment. After midweek home fixtures an entire aristocracy of Arsenal fans convene here to chew over the game and generous bowls of pasta. Hornby sits at one table with his crowd, Melvyn Bragg with his at another.

They are all tucking in by the time David Dein arrives with Wenger, and possibly Patrick Vieira, plus wives, girlfriends, an assortment of agents, directors and sundry others from the footballing shadows, to take their seats on the other side of the room. When Wenger enters they stand up and give him a 10-second ovation. If Arsenal have won, that is. But then if they haven't, he doesn't come, not even when they baked him a cake for his 53rd birthday. Arsenal had just lost at home to Auxerre. Wenger was so distraught at the defeat he locked himself in his office and, despite Dein's entreaties, wouldn't come out.

Hornby's bestselling book Fever Pitch, about the psychopathology of the football fan, and the Arsenal fan in particular, was published at the height of the George Graham era. The book saw in two league championships, and a lot of grinding football characterised by hair-trigger offside traps and domineering one-nil wins. It turned Hornby into, by some distance, the best-known Arsenal fan and the most widely read football author in Britain. When they met, Wenger had actually heard of both writer and book, published in French as Carton Jaune (or Yellow Card).

"He said, 'Ah! You wrote Carton Jaune. Why no other book?' I said, 'I have written some other books since.' 'And it's OK? You can live from writing?' I said, 'No no, things are going fine.' It was beyond his conception that you would want to write anything other than a football book."

Arsenal went for a man with no other life outside football. Wenger was a hermit whose altar, once he'd settled into his new detached home in Totteridge, was a large flat-screen television on which he'd watch a never-ending flow of matches deep into the night. But because his personality presented such a blank canvas, there were those, usually thought to be Tottenham fans scared out of their wits, who decided they could paint on it what they wanted.

No sooner had Wenger set foot in England than a grotesque rumour swiftly mushroomed on the internet that the new saviour of Islington had a highly deviant sex life involving not only women, not even just men, but also children. Without repeating the content of the rumour itself, newspapers passed on the fact that a rumour of a plainly damaging nature was in circulation.

According to one eye-witness, Wenger was "incandescent with a white-hot rage" when he heard about it. But at least in France one of these rumours was in fact old hat. "During the seven years we were here we were always together, except at night, and people thought we were homosexuals!" says Jean Petit, his assistant coach at Monaco, and one of his closest friends.

There was a home game for the reserve team that day. Fans were gathering outside the stadium, and they congregated around a group of press - some football writers, other news reporters, and a television news team - who were waiting outside the stadium for an official comment from within the club. Meanwhile, inside, it was made clear to a distraught Wenger that in England he could not simply sue the newspapers for libel unless they specifically published the charge made against him. He did, however, rapidly take on board, when it was explained to him, that he could sue for slander if any of the reporters outside could be persuaded to put a name to the rumour in front of witnesses. Against the advice of Dein, and to the alarm of the press officer Clare Tomlinson, whose own first day in the job this was, he went outside onto the steps of Highbury's famous old marble hall and confronted them.

This was an act of considerable bravery. According to Adams, Wenger "hates confrontation", and here was a confrontation before he had taken charge of a single game. For all the press knew, he was about to resign. Instead, he asked them why they were there. When someone referred to unspecified rumours, Wenger said, "What rumours?" No one spoke. The journalists, feeling hampered by the presence of the fans, asked if they could come inside the stadium and have a private press conference. Tomlinson refused. Facing the realisation that they had nothing to go on, the press slunk away. Wenger had killed the story stone-dead.

'We were all ready to jump ship'

Because they didn't know who he was, one Saturday two weeks before his arrival, Wenger appeared by live satellite link on the video screens at Highbury. They should have played it in the dressing room too. It was one thing for the club's most famous fan not to have heard of Wenger, quite another for the club captain. Like Hornby, Adams didn't know the new man from Adam.

"There was a feeling of who the fuck is he and what is he going to do? What is he?" says Adams, who first heard tell of Wenger when he got a call from the club chairman, Peter Hill-Wood, ringing from New York. Rioch had been sacked, caretaker manager Stewart Houston had left for Queens Park Rangers and Adams and Rice were "kind of just getting on with it", recalls the captain. "I got a call from the chairman along the lines of, 'I hear the shit's hit the fan back there. Er, don't worry, rally the troops. Good man on his way. Be patient.' It was quite hilarious." (It's a toss-up which is dodgier: Adams's Etonian accent or his Alsatian one.) Did he know anything about Wenger? "No." Literally the name meant nothing? "No. Nothing at all. He wasn't an English top-of-the-tree coach with proven experience. He wasn't an Alex Ferguson. He wasn't a renowned manager of that time - a George Graham."

Wenger's appointment was announced on August 20, he met the press on September 22 and took official charge on September 30, a Monday morning. "He arrived unnoticed at the training ground," Lee Dixon recalls. "A meeting was called, the players filed in and in front of us stood this tall, slightly-built man who gave no impression whatsoever of being a football manager."

Adams says that Wenger wasn't a George Graham. That was precisely why the club hired him. Graham's crowning achievement was to win a championship in 1989, famously in the dying seconds of the season, with a side impressively crammed with graduates from the youth team. "With George everything was predicated on winning," says Hornby. "If they weren't winning anything, there was absolutely nothing to watch. It was so dismal watching that team 20 times a season. They were awful."

"George had a fantastic group of youngsters that he controlled and we achieved great things," says Adams. "That squad broke up in 92-93, and we didn't have the second wave. With a very, very average squad we won the European Cup Winners' Cup with a fantastic attitude, work-rate and fantastic defending. It was an enormous effort. That team was ready to bust. I personally was not able to kick another ball. I was at my lowest point. The club was pretty much going nowhere. We were all ready to jump ship."

It was an extremely precarious moment in Arsenal's history. With Manchester United now dominant, Arsenal had become entirely dependent on an impregnable defence and the goals of Ian Wright to keep them in contention. "There was no reason why we couldn't have turned into Spurs after Rioch," says Hornby. "People seem to think it's part of the natural order of things that Arsenal and Man U are one and two in the Premiership more or less every year now. It's not in the natural order things. It's entirely because of Wenger."

· Wenger: The Making of a Legend by Jasper Rees is published by Short Books. To order a copy for £12.99 plus p&p (rrp £14.99), call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.